Niko Coppenhagen

After 37 years of street photography Niko Coppenhagen noticed that he was repeating himself. It had stopped giving him satisfaction. Street life has also changed enormously in the past 15 years. Nothing seems to be as it was before. People are watching their phones and stop paying attention to what is happening around them. Where has the magic of the authentic gone?

How could he transform his frustrations into art?

Desillusioned by the emptiness of the people and the result it had on his photography, he remembered a free exercise by photographer Franco Fontana: photograph anything you feel attracted to without moving the camera up to your eye to determine a frame. Photograph from the hip or belly and shoot from above or below, and react instantly.

This way he could use the camera like a painter uses his brush and consciously abandon the way he assumed he had to photograph. In fact he thereby put the art of letting the ego go into practice, and go from the Dark in search of the Light in and around him.

By taking an extreme low point of view and pointing his camera at the sun and the light, the sky and the fractions of light were envelloped by the silhouette of the people and showed never seen creatures of which only the contours were visible.

This game of Dark and Light turned out to have the information embedded that he had always felt subconsciously. A triple jump from the Dark through the Silhouette into the Light.